If you *really* need to programatically return data from one table or another while being 'transparent' to an application, there is at least one way to do this. It will have a performance hit compared to fetching directly from a table, and DML is a bit nasty. If you want to do this, let me know and give us a bit more information regarding your requirements and Oracle version. I can then try to give you a solution. Steve On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 7:55 AM, Bobak, Mark <Mark.Bobak@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Exactly...or a private synonym called blah that points to a table in another > schema. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Bill Ferguson [mailto:wbfergus@xxxxxxxxx] > Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 3:54 PM > To: Bobak, Mark > Cc: stbaldwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; cemail_219@xxxxxxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: Views and tables > > Along the lines of: > > select * from blah; > > If you had both a table and a view named blah, how would Oracle know > which one you wanted to select from, especially if the structures were > different? > > > -- > -- Bill Ferguson > > > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l